And debt becomes her

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The hard heads and cold hearts that perpetuate Third World poverty face a passionate and captivating foe, writes Valerie Lawson.

Noreena Hertz loves being photographed. Nothing to do with her glamorous looks, but the stillness of the moment. "It's very zen," she says. "It's one of the few times I can just be, and be quiet."

There is little quietness in the life of Noreena Hertz, pin-up woman of the anti-globalisation movement, author, speech maker, adviser, academic. The day we met, she had written a policy paper for the Africa Commission, done three interviews before I arrived at 3pm, and "got an invitation from Prince Hussein of Jordan asking me to give the keynote speech at the Club of Rome and speak specifically about debt".

If she wasn't so pleasant and smiley, Hertz would be annoyingly perfect. She is a fellow at the University of Cambridge, the author of the bestseller The Silent Takeover, is regularly described as "gorgeous", is about to appear in a fashion feature for British Vogue, has been invited to No.10 Downing Street as part of a British delegation meeting the Chinese Prime Minister, and numbers among her friends Bono and Bob Geldof.

Her new book, The Debt Threat and Why We Must Defuse It, took 18 months to write, every day, "from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep. It was that intense. You wake up in the middle of the night and think about it. It takes over one's life, especially when you know the issues you're writing about are matters of life and death for some people. I was like a woman obsessed."

The book reads like an impassioned speech in which she implores the listener to take up arms against the injustice of Third World debt. Aimed at the general public, not an academic audience, her first chapter is scattered with phrases such as "spinning his Rolodex" and "enter the Terminator", as she tries to engage the reader in a dry subject. Hertz is more measured when she tackles the history of Third World debt, from the days when the World Bank was created following the meeting at Bretton Woods, through to the Cold War, during which some Asian countries were perceived by the United States as "red threats". She is convincing about the way debt can be seen as a tool of subjugation, in which "countries are kept in debt specifically to keep the weak, weak, the poor, poor, the powerless, powerless, not only to maintain pre-existing social and economic hierarchies, but also to strengthen and reinforce them".

All this will be familiar turf to many, but Hertz goes much further into the subject, with chilling, yet sometimes entertaining chapters on the parasites that feed on debt, the "pushers and junkies, traders and vultures", as she calls them, and she examines how Third World debt impacts on the health, welfare and education of those who live in the world's poorest countries.

Each book sold in Britain has a postcard inside it, asking the reader to fill it out and send it to parliamentarians, and when the book is launched in the United States in January, readers will be asked to go to a website where they can "send an e-card to whoever is president at the moment, to their local senator, and congress person".

A chance meeting early last year with a Rwandan Government official inspired the book. Describing the devastation in Rwanda after the genocide, he told Hertz: "We had just got into power. It was 1994. The streets of Kigali were littered with dead bodies. The previous regime had looted the coffers. There wasn't a single stapler or a typewriter left in ministerial offices. And so we went to the World Bank, that first week, and we said 'we desperately need some help'. And do you know what the World Bank said to us? 'Not until you have paid the $3 million interest on your outstanding debt.'"

Says Hertz: "It made me think about my own experience with the World Bank and why I decided to stop working as a consultant to them."

When she was 23, Hertz was part of a World Bank team that advised the Russian government on its privatisation program.

"Being more junior, I was the person sent to Russia to live in the factories and feed back information to the bank. I spent months in the factories. In one, I slept in an empty ward in the sanitarium. I realised very quickly that the master plan of privatising Russian industry overnight was going to impose huge costs on hundreds of thousands of people. These factories were producing goods that once they were launched, no one would want in a too-competitive market. They would have to slash tens of thousands of jobs. But also, these factories provided schools, hospitals, health care and retirement — cradle to grave. I raised these concerns in Washington, to say there weren't any safety nets in place. It became clear to me that it was really a political play, that they wanted to take assets out of the state's hands, so the Communist Party wouldn't come back.

"The clear political sway of the institution I was working for, coupled with this awful story about Rwanda — I thought there is a much bigger story here to debt than one initially thinks. It's this incredible story of geopolitical interests, ideological dogmatism, and corporate interests."

Hertz was lucky enough to have access to research assistants (16 of them) at the University of Cambridge. But she is also a dogged researcher herself, as evidenced by her London home stashed with dozens of milk crates full of material. She has a knack of retaining, in her memory, a patchwork quilt of statistical information, such as: "Indonesia now pays 10 per cent of its GDP on debt serving, 1.3 per cent only on health and 1.6 per cent on education, and this in a country where unemployment is running about 10 per cent a year and growing steadily."

She says Indonesia has serious terrorist concerns but can't invest in major security because it is servicing its debt. "I see that in a whole lot of countries — weak states, or states unable to deliver to the people. That creates an opportunity for extremist organisations to gain serious footholds and popular legitimacy."

Hertz acknowledges how lucky she is to be born "within a nice London existence and not into some village" but her crusading zeal was there at the start, learned at the knee of her mother, Leah, a feminist activist as well as a fashion designer who died of cancer when she was 20. She says of her family: "I come from an arch-feminist home. My mother championed women's causes. She was a pretty cool woman."

The same could be said of Hertz. But does she ever worry about how much publicity she might get in years to come, when the media might not describe her as "a beautiful mind" or "brainy and gorgeous"?

"I do believe that if the only way you can get stories is this glam pastiche, while it still has currency, so be it."

The Debt Threat and Why We Must Defuse It, $29.95, will be published by HarperCollins on October 27.